Young, slim, fragile, apprehensive that the contemplated step might work havoc with her career on the stage, nevertheless Lillian Gish stood before David Wark Griffith in his little office in the Biograph audio at 11 East Fourteenth Street, New York. City, and asked him for a steady job in the infant movies.
Mrs. Mary Gish and Dorothy flanked her, with a brave show of confidence.
The two sisters, with a wealth of arduous stage experience in child parts, had decided to hitch their little wagons to the new amusement.
Griffith hired them as permanent members of the company he was taking with him to southern California--to the Triangle Films Corporation, which he had joined after severing his Biograph ties.
Lillian was to get a fat salary of fifty dollars a week.. Dorothy was to be paid twenty-five dollars and guaranteed three days of work each week. If she worked other days she was to get' five dollars additional a day.
So the whole troupe of youthful pioneers in the new adventure boarded a train and went to Los Angeles. Arriving there,-Lillian Gish found a condition that must be explained a
bit for the lay readers of this her life story.
The Triangle Corporation embraced three separate units. Thomas Ince ran his own
company, and he had such stars in his Culver City studio as Bill Hart, Charles Ray, Billie, Burke, Enid Bennett, Dorothy Dalton, and Frank Keenan.
Mack Sennett was turning out his unforgettable comedies with the help of Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Waliace and Noah Beery, Mabel Normand, and Ford Sterling.
Under the name of the Fine Arts Company, Griffith was striding to immortality with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Bobby Harron, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Miriam Cooper, George A. Siegmann, Henry B.
Walthall, Jack Pickford, Kate Bruce, Spottiswood Aitken, Courtney Foot, and Hattie Delaro. All three of these historic companies were united in the Triangle and through it released their pictures.
MISS GISH smiled as she talked ''' about those early days:
" The first two people I met when we reached the scene of our future labors were Mack Sennett and Norma Talmadge. I had never seen Norma, but I had worshipped her in the silence and darkness of the little motion-picture theaters.
"When we met I stood speechless before her. Then she smiled and held out her hands.
"'Oh!' I breathed. I could say no more. She put her arms about me-and there began one of the great friendships I have been privileged to form in my life. A fine actress, a model wife, a wonderful woman, Norma Talmadge Schenck is a lovely rose which for
years has adorned the garden of the motion picture world.
"Mr. Sennett, probably the richest man in the movies today, tossed me up in the air when I alighted from the train.
We laughed as we commented on the difference between his standing then and when he first came into the films.
"It was long before my entry, and it's a rare story. Older men in the Biograph studios had told me a couple of humorous episodes of those early days.
" Sennett was a huge, awkward, aimless sort of Irishman with a priceless sense of humor. One day he stuck his head in the door at 11 East Fourteenth Street, and spied Bobby Harron sweeping out the front hall. Bobby then was making himself useful as janitor, movie extra, and errand boy for Mr. Griffith.
"'Shure, me bye, can ye tell me if this outfit needs a strong man?
Oi want a job,' he whispered, his face turning red.
"'Come -on in and I'll ask the boss,' said Bobby.
"'Oi'll not come in at all and be bounced out on me head. If the boss wants to hire me he'll have to come out here on the sidewalk. Go tell him.'
called to Mr. Griffrth: 'Chief, do you need a strong man?'
"'A strong man!' Mr. Griffith echoed. 'What do I want a strong man for? '
" 'Dont know boss,' said Bobby. 'All I know is, there's one out here says he wants a job in the movies.'
"'Well, tell him to come in.' "'No; he says he won't come in.
If you want to see him you'll have to go out on the street. He's afraid of being thrown out on his head.' "Mr. Griffith smiled and went out-to make history in the pictures. He talked with the shy Irishman, got a dozen laughs out of him, and promptly gave him a job.
"Sennett immediately attached himself to Arthur Johnson. Little is remembered today of this superb actor, but he was probably the greatest figure before the camera we have ever known.
"When the rest of us were getting twenty-five dollars a week, when Mary Pickford left Mr. Griffith because the Famous Players offered her $100 a week, Johnson went to Bauman & Kessel for $3,000 a week. That shows how marvelous he was. Unwise habits led to his untimely death.
"The devotion that he inspired in Sennett's wild bosom was one of the most ludicrous and one of the most beautiful things in our experience.
"Johnson was an exquisite wit, and one of his favorite pastimes was to imitate the pompous, deep throated actors of the old school.
"He would walk into the bar at L¸chow's famous restaurant down
the street, advance magnificently to the white coated attendant, and speak in his thundering, resonant tones:
"' Bahtendah, two beers, sir, if you please.
One large one for.Mr. Arthur Johnson-myself; and one small one for my dog.'
" Then he would turn to the street door, raise his powerful voice, and cry out:
"'Dog, approach thy master, who is about to vouchsafe thee one small flagon of brew!'
"The door would fly .. open and Sennett would come bounding across
the floor on all fours, barking and wriggling his body. When he
reached Johnson's side, he would squat on his haunches, raise his
paws, and beg.
- " Then Johnson would lift the small glass and, with dignified gestures, pour its contents down Sennett's throat.
"ONCE, after Johnson's precepts and example had smoothed down some of his worshiper's rough edges, Sennett invited Mr. Griffith, Henry Walthall, Johnson, and several other famous film stars to a luncheon at L¸chow's.
"They found a great round table near the front window.
After they were seated, Sennett excused himself for a moment.
"Presently a motley crowd of men and women and ragged children began to parade to and fro on the sidewalk, peering in at the diners.
"This annoyed Johnson, who pounded on the table with his fist and called the head waiter.
"'My man,' the actor roared, .' pray explain yon rabble spying on gentlemen at meat. If it is to be thy custom to insult the guests of this indescribably vile provender dispensary by exposing them to uncouths along the curb, be informed, sir, that henceforth Arthur Johnson will fork elsewhere.' "The head waiter wrung his hands and promised to disperse the growing throng.
" Then Johnson, who could read Sennett's mind as if his skull were glass, turned on the trembling comedian.
"'Thou canine yelper at my heels! I know that in some.
fashion thou hast contrived this disgraceful incident in my life.
Afoot immediately, and explain-and see to it that only truth fall from thy jowls!'
"Blushing and stammering, Sennett confessed that he had gone out to telephone his boarding-house, filled with his countrymen, that he had great company at luncheon; and to invite them to witness his glory through the window.
"Johnson made him run the spectators away.
"What glorious days, those early ones in the movies! Not long ago Mr. Sennett thrust his head into Mr. Griffith's office and cried out: 'Boss, do you need a good, willing, honest strong man?'
"Mr. Griffith turned his head and laughed as they recalled the great comedy director's application for a job with the old Biograph Company. '
"THE Fine Arts studio was an unpretentious lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. There we began to work.
"I have often been called a Griffith product. Well, in a way I am, of course, and proud to be so described. In a great many ways I am not. Nearly all my early pictures were directed by Tony Sullivan and Christie Cabanne, with the famous cameraman, Billy Bitzer, as valuable to the picture as the directors.
"The cameramen in those days were more priceless than rubies.
They alone knew the mysteries of the strange devices they cranked; they alone could keep up with the new inventions that were leading to the early patent fights; only they had any idea about lighting.
"They were quite scarce, the good ones, and some of the most bitter battles of the pioneering movie days were the result of one company's kidnapping a cameraman from another.
" That is the only reason motion pictures were made in Chicago.
By stealing the New York camera wizards and shanghaiing them out to Chicago, producers could coddle them and keep them from the fascinations of the metropolis.
"Of course, Mr. Griffith supervised everything, and Sullivan and Cabanne really transmitted to me; what the chief director wanted.
In that way I am a Griffith product; and, of course, I am identified with the great pictures he was to turn out for an astonished world to make obeisance to during the next few years.
"But the first picture in which he actually directed me was The Birth of a Nation, and I had then been in the films for nearly eighteen months. My first picture in Hollywood was called The Lily and the Rose, and I was identified simply as The Girl.
"The names of the actors were not used, as a rule. I don't think my name ever appeared on the screen until The Birth of a Nation. Other early films were The Pirate and Daphne; but I forget the rest.
"Our hours were long, and not at all idle. From eight in the morning until seven in the evening we toiled, turning out in wholesale lots the two- and three-reel plays with the saccharine! endings. After dinner we ran off the day's takes in the projection-room.
"But during all the days and weeks and months of our labors the great Griffith was dreaming his dreams and reveling in his visions--and in the fall of 1914 he began The Birth of a Nation.
"This was founded on a novel, The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon; and, from the moment he first broached the outlines of the picture to his backers until it was finished, Mr. Griffith's nights and days were one long, unbroken series of discouragementÌs and difficulties.
"In the first place, no picture had ever run over four reels, and Mr. Griffith had battled for permission to make the first of that length, just as he had fought when he made the first two-reeler ever -turned out.
"Finally the company grudgingly appropriated a sum far from sufficient for the daring experiment of making a twelve-reel movie.
" The assembling of the cast and the takes and retakes of the historic panoramas--the first time an army had ever been represented by anything more than two or three soldiers in line; the immense wardrobe requirements; and the brand-new elements which he introduced for the first time into motion pictures promptly reached a figure that exceeded his budget.
"The directors refused to put up another dollar; and Mr. Griffith began to split his interest in future receipts among the people from whom he had to buy things.
Here is an interesting illustration of what I mean:
" It was necessary to retake certain battle scenes in which Confederate uniforms were used. The money for their rental had been exhausted, and the Los Angeles costumer--his name escapes me, but it reveals his German ancestry-accepted a one-per-cent interest in the picture for the second use of his uniforms.
"Mr. Griffith was to pay that out of his share. This was late in 1914.
" Years passed and America got into the World War, We made
other Allied-propaganda films.
"Not long after the Armistice, two Federal Secret Service men visited Mr. Griffith's office and asked to see him. Jack Lloyd, the director's right hand ever since he went into the pictures, said his boss couldn't be disturbed. They insisted.
"It finally came out that the former costume had backed several films during the war, and the government regarded them as pro-German propaganda. He had been arrested.
"'But what has this got to do with Griffith?' Lloyd asked.
"'We have examined the prisoner's books and we find that during the war Griffith gave him large sums of money.'
"'Nonsense!' Jack exclaimed.
'You know Griffith did nothing but make war films ever since we got into it.'
"The Secret Service men declared, however, that they must question Mr. Griffith.
" He came, and admitted giving the costumer the $150,000 they found on his books-but he explained that that sum represented the man's one-per-cent interest in The Birth of a Nation.
" Incidentally, the excostumer, I heard, was sentenced to prison.
Lloyd, who handles most of Mr.
Griffith's publicity, did not discourage the company's claim that the new picture cost $500,000. The truth is, it cost about $150,000. And the test report I have heard about the box office receipts of this first great motion picture is that more than $15,000,000 has been taken in. Most of it came during the first three years it was shown, of course.
" Thomas Dixon, who consented to the change in name from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nation after he saw it privately-because he said it was nothing like his book--had a twenty-percent interest in it.
"He tried to sell it for $10,000!
The company wouldn't. give him a penny for it, and Mr. Griffith was broke. Not long ago Mr. Dixon was quoted as saying that he had made more than a million in cash out of it and had bought a vast plantation in the South.
"That Griffith masterpiece was finished in nine weeks. Then nobody could decide what to do -with it, because racial troubles and sectional hostilities were feared.
"Finally it was shown for the first time in Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915.
The rest is history.
" It-was at about this period that Dorothy made a bid for fame by discovering Richard Barthelmess and Rudolph Valentino.
"Dick was playing with Marguerite Clayk in the East. Dorothy had
never seen him in person, but had liked him in several pictures.
So she 'sold' him to Griffith, and
he was sent for. Dick's career really started with us.
"One day Dorothy noticed a handsome young Italian working beside her as an extra in one of Mr. Griffith's pictures called Out of Luck. He was clamoring for a chance to act a part.
"The director was looking for a leading man for Scarlet Days, and Dorothy described the extra, insisting that he had a personality the women would like.
"They sent an office boy for him. When he had departed, Mr.
Griffith shook his head, saying: "'Too foreign-looking for our audiences. Anyhow, he isn't experienced enough. We'll use Barthelmess.'
" I think Valentino went to Paramount just before he leaped to fame in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
SO tremendous and stunning 'had been the success that greeted The Birth of a Nation that the Fine Arts. people agreed to let Mr. Griffith make what I regard as
the greatest picture ever produced--Intolerance. I have told you why I think so.
" In it I worked only one day in one small scene: I was the young mother rocking the cradle of Life.
"For two years I continued before the camera. None of my parts was of much importance, but I worked and studied and observed as earnestly as I was capable of. Then we went to war with Germany.
"Mr. Griffith was in London the night of April 6, 1917, sitting in a theater watching the English premiere of Intolerance. When the audience stood and cheered the news that the United States had joined the Allies, Griffith decided to rush home to help.
"While he was trying to book passage, the British Premier, David Lloyd George, conceived the idea of deluging America with Allied propaganda. He called in Shaw, Barrie, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Chesterton, to discuss the best methods with them.
"Somebody suggested that David Wark Griffith be commissioned to make a gigantic war film. Lloyd George sent for the American, and a few days later Griffith cabled to Los Angeles for a company of his actors.
"As quickly as possible we sailed: Billy Bitzer, the cameraman, Bobby Harron, Kate Bruce, Ben Alexander, Robert Anderson, George Fawcett, George A. Siegmann, my mother, Dorothy, and I.
We reached London early in the summer, and went to the' Savoy Hotel.
"Then we registered with the police, and were assured that the metropolis was so well guarded that there was no chance for Zeppelin raids. Three minutes after
we returned to the hotel, the city was bombed.
"We looked up from a little balcony that gave on the Thames from our rooms, and high in the skies we saw the invaders-tiny airplanes circling placidly at' 18,000 feet and dropping their explosives all over the city.
"I think we experienced more than twenty raids while we were in London making some of the exteriors of the propaganda film -- and not a word about them was printed in the London press or permitted to go out to the world!
"We were not badly frightened during that first raid, and Dorothy and I went out in a taxicab afterward to hunt traces of the damage.
Ten days later the Germans came again. This time we were frankly nervous. We heard that much havoc had been done in Whitechapel, and after the enemy aviators departed we went down there.
" It was horrible One huge bomb had struck
squarely in the midst of a kindergarten, and ninety-six little children were blown to fragments. Talk about acting--about emotions!
Never have I seen such stark demonstrations of grief and terror.
"Poor mothers picked up pieces of bodies and tried to identify their babies! One woman ran screaming down the street with a little arm clutched to her bosom.
"The sense of helplessness, of hopelessness, of sheer heroism thrilled me as I watched the parents fumble among the shattered infants.
Strangely, I did not then or later hear one, word of anger against the Germans!
"It was war, and a part of it had come savagely home to them. Well, the Tommies and Lloyd George would exact dire vengeance.
There was nothing to do but carry on and trust the authorities to accomplish their duty as best they could.
" Several of the women recognized us as the Gish girls, and took us into their pitiful homes. Some were in ruins. But nobody despaired. How great the English are in a crisis!
"No wonder they have painted so large` a portion of the. world's map in the ink that signifies their rulership. They actually seemed to admire the nerve of the German airmen.
"Then came a moonlight raid, the fliers far up among the stars following the reflection of the moon in the historic Thames! Not a light showed in the city--and somehow I have never felt the same toward the moon since the night the immense bombs rained down on a city standing terrified and helpless in the sheen of lunar radiance.
" Dorothy and mother were in bed, and I was brushing my hair in the dark just inside the little balcony, when the first explosion came.
"The French doors leading to the verandah crashed open and my mother and Dorothy bounded to the middle of the room. We held one another tightly as we stood looking out on the dim outlines of the Thames and the buildings on its banks.
"It was utterly quiet--a long, aching silence, broken only by the crash of explosives and the echoing rumble of collapsing buildings.
Sometimes there were shrieks of anguish, ringing through the stillness like knife thrusts.
"A bomb struck in the street beneath our window. The wind rushed violently into the room, and we broke the: bonds of our paralyzing panic and fled screaming down the hall toward the stairs. The other guests were stampeding through the corridors and down the steps.
"One woman ran back for her jewel case, dropped it, and ran madly to the basement as the gems clattered down the steps and were lost.
"Just as we piled through the doors to the cellar, I remembered that we had left Chu Chin Chow, our little Pekingese puppy, upstairs. Mother flew back, and got down on her hands and knees and crawled under the bed to drag him out.
"All night the planes came from across the Channel, waves of them,
raining explosives calmly and accurately on all parts of the capital.
" British aviators soared aloft to meet them, and in the beams of the searching lights-the luminous fingers of England reaching up into the heavens to locate the daring invaders--foe and friend darted to and fro like little silver moths.
"Some of them tumbled like leaden plummets into the street as they shot each` other to pieces.
"We sat on the cement floor in our nightgowns until five o'clock, when the sirens announced that the Germans had gone.. Then we ran to our room and dressed to go out and see what had happened. I never saw anything like the Strand.
" I thought it had snowed that summer night --the street was white. But it was pulverized glass from the show windows!
Not cracked or splintered, but simply pulverized from the concussions. You could pick it up and run it through your fingers like powdered sugar.
"At the. foot of Cleopatra's Needle lay a wrecked bus. A gaping hole in the pavement half a block away showed where a missile had struck, the pieces of flying metal having demolished the vehicle, The fronts of entire buildings were crumpled in the streets.
"The top was missing from one edifice where a bomb had gone through the roof and three floors and exploded in the basement, the walls bulging out like a gigantic mushroom.
DURING the subsequent raids we were further terrified by our inability to distinguish between a direct hit and the detonations of the defending guns on the roof of the Hotel Cecil, located next door to our hotel. ''
"When the sirens wailed their messages of warning that the planes were coming, we would rush shrieking to the basement, the great guns next door shaking the neighborhood as they fired at the tiny specks of silver revealed by the patrolling beams of huge searchlights sweeping the skies.
"The woman who had dropped her jewel
case used to wait for us in the hall and we would all raced to the cellar together.
" She was an American and. like the rest of us, was far more panic-stricken than the more solid native guests.
"This woman was in an extraordinary predicament :
" She had been on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed, and had floated all night clutching a couple of deck chairs.''
" She was afraid to stay in London because of the endless air raids; and she could not muster courage enough to go home, a horribly vivid was the memory of the submarines.
think she went mad during a later raid.
"After some of the raids, the British would gather up the German aviators and bury them with full military honors. Nothing was printed about this.
"I heard of one of the funerals, and you would have thought a great English ace was being interred, so solemn and beautiful and thoroughly military was the ceremony spoken above the bodies of the slain foes.
"We made many of our exteriors in the army camps and hospitals of England.
Actually, while Mr. Griffith was-at work on the great war film he was to call Hearts of the World, it seemed to us that the war was run according to his orders!
"In England and in France he had only to ask to receive anything he wanted, from a pencil to a simulated major offensive involving 20,000 troops of all arms.
"When we finally told him we simply could not stand the air raids any longer--mother lost thirty-five pounds and has never recovered from the shocks; indeed, her paralysis for the last twelve months is a consequence of our experiences in London in 1917; and Dorothy and I were mere skin and bones-Mr. Griffith decided it was time to go to the front in France "And then, just as we were about to board a Dover train for passage on a little Channel boat, an official from the War Office came to the station and ordered the train held.
"- He talked with our little party--Mr. Griffith, mother, Dorothy, Bobby Harron, Bitzer, several doubles who were to impersonate some of the principals who we're not to go with us, and me.
"It seems that orders had come from Paris that our cameraman could not go across with us. Mr. Griffith asked why, and he was informed that France objected to Billy because his full name was Wilhelm Gottlieb Bitzer
"Mr. Griffith's amused and then angry expostulations were of no avail. Billy could wander around England, but his name was too much for France.
" So we had to leave him in London, the War Office man promising
to have French army cameramen detailed to work in the picture. We
climbed aboard and started for the becrimsoned trenches where the
World. War was raging in all 'Its lurid 'horror."
Last modified on: Friday, August 8, 1997.